Walkabout the Galaxy

Volcanoes on ancient Earth and not-so-ancient Venus are the main topics for the astroquarks, with planetary trivia, and a giant gassy wave moving through the Milky Way. Catch up on all the different types of numbers, from imaginary to prime, and all the space news  and climate updates on this episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

The astroquarks explore our origins with from the ancient fossil Lucy to the upcoming asteroid mission of the same name. They then head for the stars, including a nearby one with a potentially habitable planet, and re-examine the case for dark energy. You're not going to want to miss this one, for the science, the trivia, and a special sponsor message. 

The title has nothing to do with the episode except what could be more fundamental than simply measuring how far away something is? The astroquarks tackle this deceptively complex question on cosmological scales as well as the origins of meteor showers and archeoastronomy of ancient aurorae. 

The astroquarks are wrapped up with the passage of time and the aging of the stars, the universe, and themselves as the first annual year of the astroquark comes to a close. We discuss the red giant star Betelgeuse's mysterious year-end fainting (as in the opposite of brightening), and ss this stellar neighbor nears its explosive end, we take a look at the lives of galaxies and the universe as a whole.

Walkabout the Galaxy closes out 2019, the first annual Year of the Astroquark, with an episode touching on everything from interstellar comet I2/Borisov to the tiger stripes of Enceladus and the first map of the surface of a freakin' neutron star! As always we share abundant space news, from Starliner to the Mars InSight mole, and embarrassing nerdiness, so wrap up the year with Strange, Charm, and Top, and we'll see you in 2020 for the second annual Year of the Astroquark.

An asteroid has been observed getting smashed to smithereens by another asteroid! And a medium-sized black hole has been observed, which oddly enough is more interesting than a tiny black hole or a humongous black hole. Find out why, and catch up on nerd news, space news, and special Top quark astro-historical-paradoxical trivia on this episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

Strange quark is convinced that the swirls on the Moon are actually 2001 monoliths, and all three of your hosts are eager to go check them out. On the way, will the spacetime they're traversing be smooth or chunky? Top quark explains the difference, along with updates on Europa's ocean, space news, and trivia. 

An instrument on the International Space Station that can help us understand more about antimatter is getting an upgrade, and we review that old sci-fi staple: the wormhole. Somehow we manage to do this without talking about Star Trek (mostly), but we have nerd news and space updates together with trivia and a new discovery about some of the many moons in our solar system. 

Yes, it's just as bad as the title suggests, because when a supermassive black hole in a galactic center really gets going it can shut down star formation in the galaxy by blasting out all the raw star materials also known as atoms. The astroquarks explore galaxies with large and small star formation rates, plus we catch up on space news with Voyager 2 and the return to the Moon, and some throwback Voyager trivia.

Some clever detective work has found one of the smallest black holes known. The astroquarks also take a look at the puzzling mess of the Hubble Constant and the disagreement over its value. Plus, the interstellar comet's supply of water seems consistent with our own solar comets, and the Lagrange Points (the musical quintet, not the set of gravitational potential equilibria in an orbiting two-body system, duh!) sponsor our show. Tune in for all that and universal trivia. It's a veritable astroquark soup!

The astroquarks are joined by Dr. Renee Weber from NASA's Mars Insight mission to bring us the skinny on that spacecraft's mole's struggles to burrow into Mars. We also check in on polluted white dwarf stellar remnants and what they are teaching us, remarkably, about the interiors of exoplanets, plus spacecraft trivia, philosopher wars, and of course yet another sponsor for Walkabout the Galaxy.

The astroquarks are joined by Dr. Adam Burgasser from the Cool Star Lab at the University of California San Diego to talk about the mysterious members of the astrophysical menagerie that lie between planets and stars. Brown dwarfs are lurking in the dark, sometimes closer than we might think. We also have spaceflight history trivia, 20 new moons, and a spot about G.

The astroquarks spin around the universe, from an ancient tree's rings providing clues to magnetic reversals on Earth to planets wandering among the stars and the first detection of the filamentary structures of hydrogen gas strung between clusters of galaxies. Plus space news, nerd news, and Star Wars Lego trivia! This episode is a veritable Kessel Run.

The astroquarks welcome Stephanie Jarmak from UCF to discuss the study of gluons, the hilariously named force-carriers that hold quarks together, Trojan asteroids sharing Jupiter's orbit, eyeball planets and snowball planets, and more. All this plus space news, nerd news, and relativistic trivia on the latest episode of Walkabout the Galaxy.

This special episode of Walkabout comes to you from a hotel room in Geneva Switzerland following the joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's planetary science division and the European Planetary Science Congress for a free-wheeling discussion of highlights from the meeting, the solar system's most recent visitor from interstellar space, and new findings about how an ancient asteroid collision helped diversify life on planet Earth.